Ever since voters in Washington State and Colorado approved legalizing the recreational smoking of marijuana last November, the public has been waiting to see how the Obama administration would react. So far, officials have only said that they are monitoring the situation to see how those states implement their new pot-friendly laws, and that a more specific policy announcement is coming soon. At the National Association of Attorneys General annual conference on Feb. 26, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department was close to reaching a decision on how to proceed.

"We are, I think, in the last states of that review and are trying to make the determination as to what the policy ramifications are going to be, what our international ramifications are," Holder said, adding that an announcement would be made "relatively soon."

One thing that's clear is despite decades of war against marijuana, pot's popularity continues to climb. While there's been an overall drop in usage of most other drugs, teenage use of marijuana remains at an all-time high, and voters in more states are passing medical marijuana laws each year. But rather than give up the war on weed, statistics show that the government continues to stubbornly prosecute marijuana cases.

In fact, according to a recent Huffington Post article, annual marijuana arrests nationwide have more than doubled since 1980, and now cost U.S. taxpayers $10 billion a year. Even more disturbingly, in 2011, the year the Obama administration began cracking down on California's medpot industry, there were more marijuana arrests--663,032, to be exact--than for all violent crimes in America.

Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is managing editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).